During Christmas 1960, Basil Dearden asked him to look at a script entitled Victim with the thought that Bogarde would play Melville Farr, a homosexual barrister threatened with blackmail. Following his instincts that this role might be the breakthrough he had been searching for, he accepted, but had one emphatic stricture: ‘I’ll do the film on condition I can actually say “I was in love with a man”. The film was pointless without it. The consternation and shock and surprise! We put that scene in after they’d agreed to make it. Victim helped to change the law because Lord Arran used it as a hammer in his campaign.’ (Shivas, 4) His subtle, layered portrayal of Farr, cool on the surface but seething inside, in a film whose topic was considered groundbreaking at the time, became a major turning point in his career. Yet, as Bogarde told an interviewer, the role had not directly come to him: ‘Let’s be honest about it. Everyone had turned it down. I’m not ashamed of it - some of my best parts have been turned down by all the others. This part was turned down because everyone said it was revolting, that it was about a homosexual, and that I would have to play a man who was middle-aged. I played it and it was a great success.’ (Wiedenman, 55)

The critic Dilys Powell, long an admirer of Bogarde’s work, wrote: ‘Dirk Bogarde gives the commanding performance one has long expected from him. With a fine control of gesture and tone he conveys both the suffering of the man condemned by nature and the resolve of the man bent on sacrifice.’ (177)